“This film was almost banned in the United States, which, for me, makes it even more essential to see it,” was the phrase that actor Jeremy Strong used to promote ‘The Apprentice’, the controversial film about the former President Donald Trump that was rejected by the major Hollywood studios and condemned by the Republican candidate’s campaign alike.
Strong, who plays the political operator Roy Cohn, one of Trump’s mentors, accompanies Sebastian Stan in this film that will be released this weekend in 1,740 theaters amidst criticism, praise and a very good reception at international festivals. weeks before the 2024 presidential elections are held.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Stan, who plays a young Trump who seeks to make his way in the bloody real estate world of New York, to accept the role he had to cross out the names of all the characters in the script in order to remove his preconceptions about the protagonists. . Once he did this exercise, he realized that the story had important potential to be told.
“I moved away from my own opinions and projections about what I thought I knew,” Stan said. «In fact, I found it much more countable than I thought. What this was trying to explore was: What happens to a human being in pursuit of the American dream?”
Strong, who embraced the project after masterfully playing the character of Kendall Roy in Succession, has been highly praised for his portrayal of Cohn, even receiving positive comments from Republican consultant Roger Stone, who is very close to Trump.
“I met Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn was a friend of mine. Actor Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Roy Cohn in the new film ‘The Apprentice’ is astonishing in its precision,” Stone said in his X profile.
However, the Trump campaign has been very hostile to ‘The Apprentice’, not only publicly discrediting it as a “lying” portrayal of the former president, but even threatening the major studios and the film’s directors with cease and desist letters.
In fact, a Trump spokesperson called the film’s content “pure fiction that sensationalizes lies that have been widely debunked.”
Although the words of the Trump campaigns are harsh, perhaps the characterization is not entirely misguided, since the film itself gives a warning that the content is fiction and that much of the script, written by journalist Gabriel Sherman, is based on investigations, interviews, biographies, legal filings and Trump’s own memoirs.
According to critics, the film portrays Trump as Cohn’s apprentice who teaches him how to make a living and succeed in a cutthroat world full of sharks. In short, a young entrepreneur who wanted to fulfill, at all costs, the American dream.
Some reviews claim that Trump is shown as a polarizing character, but, at the same time, human, something that could provoke harsh criticism among the most progressive press at a decisive electoral moment.
Director Ali Abbasi is aware of this fact and, although he knows that the film could raise concerns about Trump in a decisive electoral context, his intention was never to reach this situation, as he had been working on the film since 2018.
“Some people will say, ‘This is too flattering, it’s too favorable a portrait of him. Aren’t you worried that people are going to vote for him?’ That’s not my job. Affecting elections is not my job,” Abbasi said. “But of course it is important. “We are like riding on the back of a dragon here.”
And, although the film suffered the disdain of Hollywood and almost languished without distribution, people like Tom Ortenberg, the film’s eventual distributor at Briarcliff Entertainment, showed up to lend their support.
“I enjoy taking on films that others are afraid to tackle, that others are frankly too cowardly to take on,” Ortenberg said in statements collected by the WSJ. “I would have expected a bidding war between distributors, but word got out that the big studios were running away from the movie like their hair was on fire.”
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